1. Technical Field
The instant disclosure generally relates to data recovery and, in particular, to methods for recovering content stored on devices on-board vehicles, such as aircraft.
2. Background
Hard disk drives or solid state drives on-board vehicles, such as aircraft, are often housed in a harsh environment. For example, an aircraft can lose power momentarily when pushing back from a gate or when arriving at a gate because of a switch between ground power (e.g., provided by a ground power unit) and aircraft power (e.g., provided by power sources on the aircraft). This switching of power sources or loss of power can damage drives on-board the aircraft resulting in a loss of data, such as a loss of content (movies, music, etc.) to be distributed to passengers on the aircraft.
Most disk drives go through read and write cycles, and a loss of power to a disk, especially during a write cycle can corrupt the disk. Power on-board vehicles is not predictable, and, thus, corruption or damage to disks is likely. Operating systems and disk utilities can try to “recover” a damaged disk (e.g., via repairing partition tables or recovering portions of damaged files). However, many disk recovery processes are lossy and can cause further damage to a disk if the disk losses power during the recovery. In fact, such a loss of power during recovery can render the disk totally unusable.